Wednesday, December 9, 2009

2009 is drawing to a close and it was a good year for photography and art books. I had a very hard time weeding books out for this list. I see now it is a really odd mix that reflects my ever-shifting tastes.

Best Books of 2009

1. Lisboa: cidade triste e alegre by Victor Palla and Costa Martins. I applaud this incredible reprint of the classic Palla and Martins book as the production is as impressive as the photographs. An extremely complicated book to do a facsimile and they nailed it right down to the printing, paper and binding. Plus it is very affordable considering how expensive it was to produce each copy. Do not hesitate. These will not last long.

2. Robert Frank: Looking In. Priceless. 14 years in the making. And I thought I was tired of The Americans. Get the hardcover version with all the good additional material.

21 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Thank you for the list and the passion you keep on injecting in this fine blog. Number 1 is by far one of the best and most important reprints of the last few years - absolutely essential.Novemberrejse is fantastic, Baldessari's Pure Beauty very good. And Steinmetz so under-rated - but simply genius.

Great list, but don't think I have one of these books. Makes me wonder where I went wrong. I would like to nominate 'Flow and Fusion' by Ken Kitano, that I saw at Paris Photo...http://www.bookshop-m.com/world/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=32

I opened this post hoping you had included the latest Mark Steinmetz. The photography is amazing and he and Nazraeli have managed to put it beautifully into book form. The same can be said of the earlier two "chapters" of the work. I just hope the trilogy is only temporary -that this collection of American photographs expands into further installments.

thank you for this year's list and for sharing your knowledge and passion through yet another year with us.The Lisboa book seems a real gem but as I looked again today the page that you link to, is not longer available!I show yesterday that the book would become available from Dec 11th.Any idea whether the book would be available via the major internet bookshops, or is there any other way to contact the seller?

Jeff,Interesting list, but some of the titles are pricey. I've followed your blog for a while and you seem to be becoming ever more obscure in your choice of books reviewed. Nothing wrong with widening the field, it's just that the price tags leap up commensurately. You get a lot of stuff for free, courtesy of publishers, but what about the bohemian collectors with hardly a coin for bread and soup. Here's a solution for later years, separate lists for beggars and bankers: 10 books under £30 (about 60 bucks) and 10 under £100. What do you say?

Here's my list, albeit an Amazon merchant's, I hope Jeff you don't mind -- nor anyone else. I live in NYC so I get to thumb through a good many books. Only about a third on Jeff's lists have I come across

Was 2009 a bumper year for photo books? Most people would give a resolute no. That's the paradox: more books than ever, but fewer of note. Here's my pick anyway.

1) Andreas Gefeller, Photographs2) Joseph Koudelka, Piedmont3) Emmanuel Guibert & Didier 4) Lefevre, The Photographer (for it's novel mix of cartoon and photography working so surprisingly well) 5) Yann Mingard and Alban Kakulya, East of a New Eden6) Mark Steinmetz, Greater Atlanta (the perfect finish to the trilogy)7) Andrew Phelps, Not Niigata8) Simon Roberts, We English (though I wish the editing had been stricter)9) Bruce Connew, On the Way to an Ambush (a late re-edition of a gritty tale)10) Petersen, Anders & J.H. Engström, From Back Home

It's probably best to make lists as obscure as possible, Jeff— since the main interest of these kind of lists for the people who read them is to make "finds", not to evaluate art works like a sport competition or something.I would have put "Landmasses & Railways" upwards in the list, though ;-)Greg

I try to make my list as honestly as I can without looking at obscurity or popularity as a gauge. It is pretty clear to me when trying to make a list which books stand out through memory and not by scanning my bookshelves for a reminder. This list is of those books.

Of course, there are dozens of books I didn't see released in 2009 which might be worthy of mention.